You really can get anything your heart desires in India 🙂 And usually around the corner from where ever you are! Like this place – heart attacks and judging from the photos in the ads below, much, much more… And probably for a much better price than anywhere else.
Let’s see … vada pav, INR 7; samosa plate, INR 10; bhajia and pakodas, INR 10. Yeah, heart attacks available pretty damn cheap anywhere you look. How lucky we are 🙂

This one’s from closer to home than the last post. Very, very close to home, actually – I found this at the local supermarket. If you’re still figuring it out, let me help you – it’s recycling at its best: cartons of men’s briefs (I can’t tell what brand it is, can you?) stocked with toor dal, moong dal, and ‘hommade’ garlic/ginger paste. Well, that’s not really what I expect to find in a packet of briefs, but hey, it’s all a means to an end …

…the sense of humor to view all things around me with some equanimity…and to stay in the moment without spiraling out of control. Like when the idiots at the stop light outside my house think that honking will vaporize the idiot in front and miraculously clear a special path for them.
Anyway, this was taken months ago in Hong Kong and while it’s a modern sculpture, there was definitely a sense of serenity around it. I kept, however, wanting to speak into my communicator watch and say “Giant Buddha…into motion!” 🙂

So the BMC has decided it will now prune trees to prevent stray branches from falling. You know what that means, right? They’re just going to start chopping everything down in sight. My neighboring building society head told me that they’d chopped down the tree between us because “mosquitoes are breeding there”. He claims to be a horticulturist. Who never went to school, evidently. Because in his next breath he also told us it didn’t matter because “Only Tulsi” gives out oxygen, other trees are not important. I nearly slit my own wrists. Maybe these little clay gods will protect this peepul from being ‘pruned’ BMC horticulture style …

This nearly rivals the one shop banner I saw in Saki Naka that had Sale, Rital and Holsail on it and baffled me for a good 2 minutes after I’d passed it, by which time it was too traffic-y and too late to turn the auto rickshaw around for a photo. This gem is in Byculla, a little way from J.J. Flyover. I’ve pointed and shot at it many times but it always came out blurred. My favourite driver slowed down for me to get a legible shot 🙂

This actually says “The myth of youth guardian angel” and then the rest of the text says “enhance body energy; revitalizing to the skin” – 60 capsules made from the placenta of sheep.

Err. Right, then. The damn thing says “myth” and people still buy it? The elixir of youth based on not even a half-claim. If I remember right, these cost something like USD 100! Holy cow! Or sheep. Or something.

The doors of the loos at the Salt Water cafe in Bandra. Are these super UN- pg-13 or is my mind just in the gutter? What do you think?
In Boston, there were two hotspots with uber-cool loos. One is “33” where the basins of the men’s and women’s loos are back to back and though there is a wall between them, there are some spaces so you can see other gender hands 😉 And there’s “Mantra” where the men’s urinal is communal and sports ice and the women’s stalls have 2-way mirrors. From inside you can see girls fixing their lipstick and pouting at, well, you! (Except, of course, they only see their own reflection.)

graffiti in Amsterdam near Central Station.
It’s like Peter Gabriel’s Milgram’s 37 song, which, has the sum lyric of “We do what we’re told”. The lyric refers, of course, to Milgram’s experiment on how authority can make people torture other people (mob mentality for violence //nazis, religionist/casteist/racist/genderists). And this link taught me something I didn’t know: When he performed this in concert, Gabriel got the crowd chanting “We do what we’re told.” Since the song was not yet released and the crowd did not know its meaning, they were ironically aping the results of the experiment by doing just as Gabriel told them.